I just wanted to let everyone know that we have moved on to The Sims 4 and are no longer working on Sims 3 anymore. We are working on a tool called the Sims 4 Studio that does poses, animations, meshes and recolors 🙂 To anyone that wants to join us in The Sims 4, you can find us at http://sims4studio.com

The Sims 4 is coming. Many of us have seen demos and some of us are even lucky enough to have the CAS Demo. Thanks to friends that do have it, we were able to do some testing with The Sims 4 CAS demo and update the Blender plugins so Sims 4 animations and poses are now possible. Orangemittens has tested the plugins and created this new test animation. The download is right below the picture.

Because the only way to play an animation at the moment is using a default replacement, this first custom animation is a default replacement for the animation you see when you select the Lazy Trait in the CAS demo. You will need the CAS Demo to play this animation until the game is released.

To use it simply drop the .package in the mods folder for your CAS Demo game. Then go into CAS and select the Lazy Trait. The original EA lazy trait animation will be replaced by this default replacement.

If you have the CAS Demo please try the animation and post whether it worked for you. All feedback is much appreciated.

This custom animation was packaged using s4pe which will soon be available at the Sims4Group Site.

Toward the end of this month, the 10gb bandwidth limit on free on the http://www.box.com account was exceeded, so none of the downloads worked. For now I have moved them to a new dropbox.com account which has larger bandwidth allowances. In the future I will also be splitting the rigs into separate zip files(instead of all ages) to reduce amount of unwanted files downloaded. The links on the download page have already been updated.

You do not need to re-download if you already have the rigs/plugins. They have not been changed in any way, just relocated.

You may have seen the baby poses in the beta section of the site here. And in the last update to the rigs, there were some added baby social rigs(a2b, c2b, p2b). Cmo has now made an official update to the pose player to allow babies to pose. This means that any poses you make for babies can now be shared 🙂

Just remember when you upload, to remind your downloaders that they need to update their pose player to use the pose.

This is a minor update. I have added new baby social rigs(a2b, c2b, p2b, etc.), and also saw a post by Ballantyne about the frames per second. The current version of the pose player still does not support posing babies, but I have spoken with CMO and it will soon. You can still pose babies using the methods described in orangemitten’s tutorial here, but the social rigs are provided for convenience. Blender defaults to 24fps, but sims runs at 30fps, so to make things more convenient I updated the .blend files to default at 30fps.

You need only update if you want to make baby poses in an easier way, or if you want to make animations without having to manually set blender to use 30fps for animations.

A minor difference that shouldn’t affect anyone is that the downloads are no longer hosted at code.google.com. Due to abuse at google’s code site, they are removing hosting from google code for downloads. They recommend google drive, but that requires a login with google, so I am just biting the bullet and switching to box.com which requires no login. Google will continue hosting downloads until January 2014, but I think it’s better to switch now than later. I will look at alternative sites to host the code, and will strive to never require signup/login for any downloads. If it comes down to it, I will just buy a server for the downloads.

As far as I know, blender 2.68 will work for posing/animating, but loading custom CAS parts or props will still end badly. I would recommend that you not update blender beyond 2.67, though it may well work fine for you if you are just using the standard rig files and not customizing them.

This is the mermaid top from island paradise EP, but it seems the new blender changed things in a way that breaks mesh importing. I haven’t re-tested in-game a pose or animation from blender 2.68, but for now i would say do not upgrade.

If you are installing for the first time, get 2.67 instead of the official download, otherwise i just advise you not to upgrade yet if you use these plugins,

Awhile back, a baby rig was requested, so I created the buRig.blend. The only problem was, the pose player didn’t work for babies! I had forgotten about it until today when I was asked again if there was any progress made on being able to make poses for babies, so I gave it a try, and it seems to work 🙂

I modified cmomoney’s pose player to allow babies to use it and created a test pose to try it. Above is a picture of a test pose in-game and in blender.

The link below is a zip file with the test poses that I made, a2b_soc.blend(a rig setup with an adult and a baby), and the modified version of cmomoney’s poseplayer for anyone interested in testing.

The test pose names in b_test.package are:

a_babyhold

b_babyhold

If you want to test your own poses, you can use buRig.blend or a2b_soc.blend. Testing EA poses with the pose player don’t always work very well since the baby is usually being held by a sim, which means they are rotated in a way that won’t look right if you get the baby to use the pose player from the floor.

When testing, remember

Use the latest version of blender

Use the latest plugins and rig files

a2b_soc.blend needs to be in the multi-rigs folder in your rig folder(just like all the other multi-sim rigs)

You will need to replace the cmomoney_PosePlayer.package in your mods folder with the one in the zip file to allow babies to use the pose player. You can backup the original just in case.

Don’t laugh too hard at the test pose I made. I’m not an animator, I’m a coder 😉

If all goes well, I will talk with cmomoney about incorporating this pose player change into the official download when he returns.

Hello,
Minor update here to fix some problems with the latest blender and loading props. If you update your plugins, remember that now they are for Blender Blender 2.6.7b and up, and I would recommend updating your Blender as well. There are also a few changes that let you load extra morphs on CAS parts if the BGEO is included in the package(this is still an experimental feature).

Changes:

[Plugins]
+ Fixes prop load feature for Blender 2.67
+ Load additional morphs than the Fit/Fat/Thin/Special if the BGEO is in the package